It was a pleasant room. A lounge in which perhaps a nude girl with chained hands might not seem too incongruous. Dorinda sat stiffly in the big arm chair to which she had been guided by a firm but friendly hand. ! Bit early for a drink, I suppose," Mark smiled at her appraisingly.
"Handcuffed girls can’t hold drinks," Dorinda pointed out reasonably, but with a hint of sarcasm.
"No they can’t, can they?" Mark agreed as though grateful for the reminder. He remained standing. She flushed under his scrutiny.
"Couldn’t I be draped in at least something?" She pleaded with deliberate coyness.
"No." He disposed of the request as though surprised she had made it.
"I think I could talk better if I wasn’t so… so exposed."
He dismissed the subject with an impatient wave of the hand. But his smile was again that of the boy she had met upon the road. "Young Terry’s a chatterbox," he confided. "She has to sparkle. We’ll get to wherever we are going better without her."
"So you just chain her up and leave her standing on one foot?"
"What else? Besides, she loves it. Surely you saw that."
Dorinda had seen it all too clearly. It made her next question inevitable. "I am supposed to like it too?" She clinked her handcuffs.
Mark gave the question considered thought. "Actually I suppose not," he conceded. "We explained this to Dave at the time. The thing that really matters is that you are here. Crossed the Rubicon, so the speak."
"I was dumped here by a miserable S.O.B. out of spite. I was never offered a Rubicon to cross. I don’t know your Dave," she told him flatly.
"Remember little sister’s warning about hurting when you sit down?" Mark answered nonchalantly.
Dorinda tensed.
He laughed amusedly at her motion’s admission of vulnerability. "For the moment you are saved by a discrepancy of a couple of days. You weren’t supposed to show up this soon. So I’ll listen to your story. Let’s have it."
She told it in detail. "Mike’s a bastard!"
"Sounds like a resourceful type. A bit crude perhaps. Makes hard work of things… This marooning lark…! I’d have you behaving in thirty minutes."
"Behaving?" His use of the word was suspect.
He laughed at her groping for what was, for him, obvious. "For a girl, behaving is doing whatever a man wants her to do." "You don’t really mean that." Dorinda chided. She prayed inwardly that indeed he did not mean it.
"I was never more sincere."
They stared at each other in confrontation. Between them an invisible gage had been hurled upon the rug.
Dorinda temporised. "This girl your Dave is to deliver: what is she? What do you expect of her? If you’ll tell me we won’t be so at cross purposes."
"Of course, love. Sensible girl," Mark draped himself in a chair facing her and eyed his guest as though striving to gauge the effects his words would have. "Frightfully simple, really," he said airily.
Dorinda listened. The way Mark told it made everything sound exquisitely simple. Frightfully so!
"The fantasy had always been there," he explained musingly. "It was the same for Terry as for me. We were born with it as though we had carried it along from some other life or some other place. It was colored by that same wonder with which a child sees its first bird in flight or the branches of a tree against the blue sky. For us it had the beauty and rightness of all natural things. Scoff if you want. It was so. I suppose Terry was about six years old when I first tied her to the apple tree at the bottom of the garden. I wondered why she did not cry. But, for both of us it was the birth of an aesthetic glory most people never know."
"Aesthetic… tied to a tree!" Dorinda protested.
His boyish grin was accusatory. "I watched your face when we left Terry chained to her column. You glimpsed it then."
"She’s an exhibitionist with a gift for posing. She is also very beautiful." Dorinda felt her defence slipping.
"You don’t really believe that’s all you saw," Mark told her discerningly. His voice has become earnest as though she must be made to understand. "As children we played. She was always the damsel in distress. But I was never the knight in shining armor. The fantasy cast me in a different role. I was The Male: the Male to whom all females must submit by right of conquest. The wicked baron who chained the poor girl in his dungeon. He never did get as much publicity as good old Galahad. But without him there would never have been a romantic legend."
"Terry was entrancingly attuned. She always resisted in about the right degree to maintain validity. The degree of resistance always briefed me as to what I should do to her. When adolescence came she accepted the same joy with which I used it. We found her striated skin that same quality of golden wonder that had pervaded the enactment of our fantasy from the start. It was about that time that we also became lovers…"
"Whips and incest! What are you trying to prove?" Dorinda’s defences were still sliding away from beneath her feet. But she made her protest vehement.
Mark sighed tolerantly at her intransigence. "You don’t try to prove the Taj Mahal or Lake Louise in the moonlight. They are there. That’s the beginning and the end. Each is an entity with its own appeal and compulsion. So it is with our fantasy."
"And I suppose your parents approved these small pleasantries."
"We had to keep it under cover as we grew older. Awful bind actually. But they died in an accident not too long ago and left us quite a lot of money. That’s when we decided to buy The Island."
"Seems to me you have your heat’s desire. Why bother with some other poor girl?"
He shrugged. "Human perversity, I suppose. Always one more river to cross. Young Terry is absolute perfection. She and I have wondered how amusing it might be to have one that wasn’t."
"You mean kidnap?"
"Well, that is where good old David comes in. He is one of those resourceful blokes you go to when you want the impossible. Put enough money in his hand and he’ll produce it for you. We made only one stipulation. She had to be beautiful." He paused to give his next words weight. "You are beautiful."
The dark chasm had widened.
"Know what I think?" Mark asked good humoredly. "I think Dave persuaded you, and that everything probably went along OK until he hit on this quaint notion of setting you ashore to deliver yourself nicely stripped and handcuffed and ready for action. In the night you got scared and decided you had made an awful mistake and wanted out. Right?"
"Wrong!" Dorinda declared with all the emphasis at her command. "In a couple of days you are going to have an extra girl on your hands."
"Stretching coincidence a bit thin, don’t you think?"
"I have to agree to that," Dorinda conceded dejectedly. She looked across at him brightly. But don’t you see, a couple of days will prove me right."
"Suppose I have to concede that unlikely possibility too," he admitted unwillingly. "Seems sort of a silly game…"
"So, couldn’t be real nice and treat me as a sort of guest in the meantime? I like you both. You might like me. Please unlock these handcuffs and give me something to wear." She put all the feminine appeal at her command into her plea.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Get the old cerebrum working, love. You’re not that dim."